A while back I co-authored an article along with Chris Ahl from Tivoli and Ken Klingensmith from WebSphere Technical Sales about the customization of virtual images in WebSphere CloudBurst. In the article we approached image customization as a means to enable IBM Tivoli Monitoring for the operating system within virtual machines dispensed by WebSphere CloudBurst. Today I posted a short demonstration that discusses and shows this particular integration scenario. If you are interested, but haven't had time to read the article, you may want to watch the video first as it should give you a good overview of the process and results.

Talk of Tivoli reminds me that IBM Pulse 2010 is just around the corner. I'll be going to discuss WebSphere CloudBurst and how it can be paired with software from IBM Tivoli for high-value integration scenarios. In the session I'll be talking about the Tivoli Monitoring integration as well as other key points such as our integration with Tivoli Service Automation Manager, IBM CloudBurst, and more. The best part about the session is that I will be co-presenting alongside a WebSphere CloudBurst customer that will dole out practical advice for using WebSphere CloudBurst within the enterprise. Join us on Tuesday February 23rd from 3:30 - 4:30 in Conference Center 306.

Remember, any time you have questions about WebSphere CloudBurst please pass them along. You can leave comments on this blog, or you can reach me at my new Twitter location @damrhein.

The ability to package custom maintenance packages and upload them as emergency fixes is perhaps a lesser known feature of WebSphere CloudBurst, but nevertheless something that's been around since the product's initial release. This is a powerful feature that allows you to build your own fix packages that you can then apply the same way you would use WebSphere CloudBurst to apply a PAK file or fixpack shipped by IBM.

Since IBM is delivering fixes and updates to all of the contents within WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition virtual images (including the OS and IBM software components), you may wonder why you would even want to create your own maintenance packages. One reason would be if you switched out the SUSE Linux operating system shipped with the VMware ESX based images in favor of your own Red Hat operating system. In that case you would be responsible for maintenance to the operating system, and custom maintenance packages would be of interest to you. Another scenario where these custom maintenance packages come in handy would be if you created your own customized images that include non-shipped third-party software in addition to the software shipped in the images. If at some point you have the need to fix or update this software in a running virtual machine, custom maintenance packages provide you the vehicle with which to do just that.

What do these custom maintenance packages look like? In short, they are simply archives or ZIP files. The contents of the archive are largely decided by you, but there is one piece of metadata that is necessary if you want to use WebSphere CloudBurst to apply the maintenance. A file called service.xml is inserted into the root of the archive and tells WebSphere CloudBurst critical information about the custom fix archive. Here's an example of a service.xml file:

Most notably, this metadata tells WebSphere CloudBurst what module or script to invoke to apply the maintenance (Command, this executable is supplied by you), what image versions the fix is applicable to (ImagePrereqs), and the location of the working directory on the virtual machine (Location). In addition to the service.xml file and the executable, you can package up anything else, such as product binaries, which are needed to successfully apply the fix/upgrade/maintenance.

If you haven't noticed, this is an extremely flexible mechanism and can be used for just about anything. I should point out that you can only apply a given fix once per virtual machine, so it's not good for something that you want to run repeatedly against a given machine (check out user-initiated script packages instead). Also, there is a 512MB size limit on the archives. Keep these restrictions in mind when you are deciding how to use custom maintenance packages. If you are interested in learning a bit more about custom maintenance packages or other maintenance techniques, check out this article I co-authored along with Xiao Xing Liang from the IBM SOA Design Center in the China Development Lab.

When it comes to managing users and user groups within WebSphere CloudBurst, you can choose to manage all aspects of those resources within the appliance. Mainly this means that you can define and store user information (including login passwords) within the appliance, and you can define and maintain user groups and their associated membership list on the appliance. While you can do this and be sure that your information is extremely secure, you may instead want to integrate with an existing LDAP server that has some of this user and user group data. WebSphere CloudBurst certainly allows you to integrate with LDAP servers, but what does that mean for you?

For starters, when you integrate WebSphere CloudBurst with an LDAP server and enable the LDAP authentication feature, you no longer specify password information when defining users of the appliance. When users login, the password they specify will be authenticated against information stored in the LDAP server. Naturally, if you add a new WebSphere CloudBurst user with LDAP authentication enabled, that user must be defined in the LDAP server. Otherwise, WebSphere CloudBurst will prevent you from adding the user because it has no way to authenticate that person.

From a user groups standpoint, integrating with LDAP means you can no longer modify user group membership. User membership in groups is determined by information in the LDAP server. As a result, the same rule concerning adding new users applies when adding new user groups: You cannot define new user groups that do not exist in the LDAP server.

If you want to take a look at what LDAP integration looks like with WebSphere CloudBurst, I put together a short video. Let me know what you think.

If you've read anything I've written about WebSphere CloudBurst up to this point you know all about patterns. Using the appliance you can easily and quickly build, deploy, and manage these representations of your middleware application environments. Today, I want to focus in on the deployment piece in particular and take a look at how you can easily automate this process.

You can use the WebSphere CloudBurst web console to deploy patterns, and when doing so you can even schedule the deployment to happen at a later date. This scheduling capability certainly gets you on the road to an automated deployment process, but what if you want to take it one step further and eliminate the need for someone to login and manually move around the web console to schedule automated deployments? In this case, you can use either the CLI or the REST interface that WebSphere CloudBurst offers.

In this post I thought I'd take a look at using the CLI interface in order to set the stage for some nice automation around pattern deployment. It starts out with a properties file that provides details about my deployment. This includes the cloud to deploy to, the pattern to deploy, password information, and the time at which the virtual system should start.

Imagine that the properties file above gets written as the result of some other action, such as the completion of your application's build process. With the properties file in place, and I'll point out that your properties file can and probably will be more robust than above, let's move on to the code that handles the deployment process based on the information in said file. First, we have a small amount of CLI code to retrieve and parse the input data (I omitted the straight-forward properties retrieval for space):

First we get the desired deployment time and current time as datetime objects. After that, assuming the desired deployment time has not already elapsed, we calculate the difference between the desired deployment time and current time. This difference, in seconds, is then added to the result of the time.time() value to come up with a start time. After that is done, we simply retrieve the cloud that was indicated in the properties file, and then we call the runInCloud method for the pattern indicated. When calling the runInCloud method we supply the name of the virtual system that will be created, password information, and the start time we calculated earlier. As a result of this method call, a task will be generated in the target WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance and the virtual system will be started at the specified time. This will happen in an automated fashion with no human intervention required.

That's really all there is to automating the pattern deployment process using the CLI. In a more complete, end-to-end scenario you may envision the completion of one process, such as an application build process mentioned above, result in the writing of the properties file and in turn the call into the CLI to deploy a pattern. As always, feel free to send me any comments or questions.

Every time I've visited with customers about WebSphere CloudBurst, without fail someone requests that the appliance support products besides the WebSphere Application Server. We started to address these requests with WebSphere CloudBurst 1.1 when we announced the availability of a DB2 Enterprise 9.7 trial virtual image specifically packaged for use in the appliance. Very recently we continued to respond to customer requests by extending the list of supported products in WebSphere CloudBurst to include WebSphere Portal.

The WebSphere Portal Hypervisor Edition, initially offered as a Beta product, is a virtual image packaging of WebSphere Portal 6.1.5 ready for use in the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance. The image includes a pre-installed, pre-configured instance of WebSphere Portal. Also contained within the image is an IBM HTTP Server instance configured to route to the WebSphere Portal instance and a DB2 instance installed and configured as the external database for WebSphere Portal. The WebSphere Portal instance also includes Web Content Management enablement along with several samples to help users get started right away.

The user experience when building and deploying WebSphere Portal patterns remains consistent with the existing experience for WebSphere Application Server and DB2 patterns. Another good note is that you can expect similar rapid deployment capability for WebSphere Portal patterns. I got a running virtual system, with all the parts I mentioned above installed and configured (meaning no after the fact integration scripting was necessary) in under 15 minutes.

To see more, check out my new demonstration of the WebSphere Portal Hypervisor Edition for the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance. If you have a WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance you can download the WebSphere Portal Hypervisor Edition image and a usage guide from here.

I was at a customer meeting the other day, and someone asked me if they could query WebSphere CloudBurst for an inventory of all of their virtual system deployments. This person was of course aware that he could go to the web console and very quickly view all of the virtual systems. What he wanted though was something that he could run to generate a report that contained all of this information. For a purpose like this, harnessing the WebSphere CloudBurst CLI is exactly the way to go.

I thought I'd write a simple CLI script that provides an example of how you could do this.

I withheld IP addresses and host names above for obvious reasons, but if you ran the script against your environment you would see actual host name and IP address values. The script above is written once, and it can be subsequently run anytime you want an inventory of virtual systems running in your WebSphere CloudBurst cloud. There's other information available for virtual systems and virtual machines that I didn't show here, and you can retrieve it if necessary for your inventory report. In addition, I chose to print this information as regular text in a file supplied by the caller, but you might choose to generate the report in another format including XML, JSON, or anything else for that matter.

-- Dustin Amrhein

p.s. As with any sample code or script I provide here, the above is only a sample and offered as-is.

If you read some of my entries from time to time, chances are you know that you can use WebSphere CloudBurst to apply interim fixes and fixpacks to your deployed virtual systems. When you choose to apply either a fix or fixpack, WebSphere CloudBurst temporarily stops the virtual system, takes a snapshot of the system (the entire WebSphere cell), applies the fix or upgrade, and then starts the system back up. The result is an updated, running WebSphere cell, and if you need to, you can rollback the virtual system to the previous configuration by simply clicking a button.

In WebSphere CloudBurst 1.0 the application of fixes and upgrades were applied via the web console which made it hard to automate this process. However, in WebSphere CloudBurst 1.1 you can use the command line interface to apply fixes and fixpacks to virtual systems. The appliance still takes the actions I described above, thus the process is still simple, safe, and fast. The only difference is the interface through which you drive the application of the maintenance.

What does it look like? Quite frankly, it's very simple. You can go through all of my virtual systems and apply both fixes and fixpacks with the seven line script below:

You can write this script once, save it as a Jython file, and run it with the CLI's batch mode anytime you want to roll out maintenance to your virtual systems. It's really amazing to me that the above SEVEN lines are capable of rolling out all fixes and all upgrades within your WebSphere CloudBurst catalog to every virtual system the appliance is managing. I can't think of an easier or safer way to automate the deployment of fixes/upgrades to your WebSphere environments.

Let me know if you have any questions. As always you can reach me on Twitter @WebSphereClouds.

Not long ago I created a demonstration that highlighted the new support for the PowerVM platform introduced in WebSphere CloudBurst 1.1. In that demonstration I showed how you can deploy to a PowerVM cloud by defining a new cloud group that interfaces with a VMControl instance to manage a pSeries cloud environment. However, in the demo I did not go into much detail about the components of a pSeries cloud used with WebSphere CloudBurst.

Since pictures help me out a lot, I thought I’d start the discussion with an image that depicts the components in the pSeries cloud environment and the workflow when using WebSphere CloudBurst to deploy systems to this environment.

The workflow begins when a user requests the deployment of a pattern and targets that deployment for a PowerVM cloud group. WebSphere CloudBurst first checks that the cloud group contains the compute resources necessary to deploy the pattern. After the resource checks are complete, WebSphere CloudBurst decides where to place each virtual machine that will be created from deployment using its intelligent placement algorithm. No matter the type of the cloud environment being utilized the appliance retains control over placement decisions, thus ensuring the virtual system has been deployed in a way that optimizes both performance and availability.

Once the placement decision has been made, WebSphere CloudBurst communicates with the VMControl instance, which in turn instructs the Hardware Management Console (HMC) to create LPARs on the targeted pSeries machines. These LPARs will host the virtual machines that represent the WebSphere Application Server nodes in your virtual system. After the LPARs have been created, WebSphere CloudBurst leverages VMControl to instruct the Network Installation Manager (NIM) to deploy virtual images to the necessary LPARs.

When the LPARs have been created and the virtual images have been deployed to those LPARs, the common process of virtual system creation can proceed. This process includes starting virtual machines, starting WebSphere Application Server components, and running any user-supplied scripts. The end result is a ready to use, virtualized WebSphere Application Server cell running on the PowerVM hypervisor platform.

I hope this provides a nice overview of the underlying environment when PowerVM hypervisors are used with WebSphere CloudBurst. As for those users who are not WebSphere CloudBurst cloud administrators, the information above is nice to know but not necessary. The user experience with respect to building, deploying, and managing your virtualized application environments with WebSphere CloudBurst is consistent regardless of the type of your cloud platform.

If you are going to install and use WebSphere CloudBurst in your own environment, it is very likely that you would want at least two appliances. Perhaps you want to have a standby appliance in case of a failure on the main appliance, or maybe you have different teams that are looking to utilize the appliance in different data centers. In any case, once you install multiple appliances there's another requirement that will pop up pretty quickly. Naturally you are going to want to share custom artifacts among the various WebSphere CloudBurst boxes.

When I say custom artifacts, namely I mean virtual images, patterns, and script packages. Script packages have been easy enough to share since WebSphere CloudBurst 1.0 because you can simply download the ZIP file from one appliance and upload it to another. However, there are some enhancements in WebSphere CloudBurst 1.1 that make it easy to share both patterns and images among your different appliances.

As far as patterns go, there is a new script included in the samples directory of the WebSphere CloudBurst command line interface package called patternToPython.py. This script will transform a pattern you specify into a python script. The resulting python script can then be run against a different WebSphere CloudBurst (using the CLI), and the result is the pattern is created on the target appliance. You need to be sure that the artifacts that pattern references (script packages and virtual images) exist on the target appliance and have the exact same name as they do on the appliance from which the pattern was taken. There are no other caveats, and this new sample script makes it really simple to move patterns between appliances.

For virtual images, a new feature was added that allows you to export a virtual image from the WebSphere CloudBurst console. Simply select a virtual image, specify a remote machine (any machine with SCP enabled), and click a button to export the image as an OVA file. This OVA file can then be added to another WebSphere CloudBurst catalog using the normal process for adding virtual images. You can see this feature in action here.

Stay tuned for more information about some of the handy new features in WebSphere CloudBurst 1.1. We also should have a comprehensive look at the new release coming soon in a developerWorks article.

I want to clear something up about WebSphere CloudBurst that can sometimes cause a bit of confusion. In nearly all of our content about the appliance, we talk about it in the context of building private clouds consisting of WebSphere application environments. Typically people think of private clouds as something only those within their organization can access and utilize. However, with WebSphere CloudBurst you are not limited to creating that kind of a private cloud.

Perhaps it is more fitting that we talk about WebSphere CloudBurst as a means to create on-premise clouds. After all, that's really what we mean. You create a shared pool of hardware and network resources owned by your organization, and then you define this cloud of resources to WebSphere CloudBurst. Once that cloud is defined, you can leverage WebSphere CloudBurst to dispense your WebSphere application environments into that cloud. The accessibility of your application environments running in that cloud is entirely up to you.

You may decide that the cloud is indeed private and that only those in your organization or a smaller subset of users can access the environments. On the other hand, you may decide that you want to allow consumers in the public domain to request WebSphere application environments and then have WebSphere CloudBurst provision those environments into a public cloud. I say public here because while the cloud's resources are on your premise, access to that cloud is not restricted to within the organizational firewall. Ultimately, the determining factor for whether or not your WebSphere CloudBurst cloud is public or private is the network configuration you provide. If the virtual machines are associated with network resources that are publicly accessible, then I would say you have a public cloud.

I hope this entry didn't serve to only add to the confusion. The bottom line is this: WebSphere CloudBurst allows you to create, deploy, and maintain virtualized WebSphere environments in an on-premise cloud. Whether that cloud is public or private is entirely up to the network configuration that you setup.

It's about the time of year when we all look back and try to determine exactly how we spent the past twelve months. Whether we do it because we have to as part of year-end job reviews or because we like to take stock in what we've done and figure out where to improve next year, it's a time for reflection and recall. For me, this exercise made me take a look at various things we have done to deliver WebSphere CloudBurst technical collateral (articles, demos, blogs, etc.) in 2009.

For all practical purposes, our mission and efforts for such technical collateral for WebSphere CloudBurst started when it was announced at Impact in May of this year. Though there was certainly some preparatory work being done on this front, there was nothing we could really push to the public until after the announcement, and in some cases even after the appliance's release in June. Given that most of the content was produced over a six month stretch, I really think we put forth a strong effort, and I hope that this technical material has helped to both raise awareness of and educate users on the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance.

Seeing as I already went back and rounded up this content, I thought I'd provide you a centralized look at the information. To start, I accounted for the articles that we published to the IBM developerWorks site over the six month stretch. All together I counted 8 articles and a special column entry:

As you can see the articles cover quite a bit of content and range from general level overview articles to technical in-depth "how-to" style articles. In general they seem to have been received well with over 26,000 views to this point. Our goal is to keep the pace up for 2010, and we already have a few articles on our plate for early in the new year (including an overview of what's new in WebSphere CloudBurst 1.1).

Another main medium we utilized to spread the word about WebSphere CloudBurst was YouTube. On our YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/websphereclouds, we currently have 17 different videos that demonstrate how to use certain features of the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance. Though I think each demo provides value depending on exactly what a viewer is looking for, 3 of them really stick out for me.

Check out our videos if you get a chance. We've made an effort to keep them as short as possible while still providing value to viewers.

We have some WebSphere CloudBurst content spread around other places as well including this blog and my personal blog. Over the next few weeks we'll be taking a look at what worked and didn't work with respect to getting information out to the public. Of course at any time we very much appreciate your feedback on how you like to see content delivered because you are our target audience! If you have a comment, idea, or suggestion, leave a comment on the blog or send me a tweet to @WebSphereClouds.

Users of cloud computing solutions today expect to be charged for exactly the amount of compute resource they use. No more, no less. This expectation is often at the forefront of our customers' minds when contemplating the creation of internal or private clouds. They want to be sure that any solution they use audits the activity and usage of their cloud and enables them to consume this information to implement their specific chargeback scheme.

Thought it's not a feature we always seem to talk about, WebSphere CloudBurst provides the necessary capabilities to properly allocate costs to users, teams, and organizations. To start with there are some handy usage reports that you can view directly from the WebSphere CloudBurst console. For instance, as seen below, a WebSphere CloudBurst administrator can see a break down of cloud resource usage for each user of the appliance.

While the capability illustrated above is nice, it is likely that if you are implementing an enterprise-scale chargeback scheme you want to automate the processing of the usage data, thus implying the need to programatically consume such data. WebSphere CloudBurst enables you to do just this by way of its audit log. The WebSphere CloudBurst audit log is a record of each and every action taken in the appliance, along with information about who took the action, when the action was taken, what object the action was taken on, and much more. You can instruct the appliance to generate this file for a specified date range, and the output is a comma separated value file that can then be consumed in a manner of your choosing.

As an example of some of the things you can do with this data, I recently wrote a Java program that parsed the audit file and for each virtual system determined who created it, who deleted it (if it had been removed), and the duration of its existence. This program was simple (more of a string parsing exercise than anything else), but nonetheless provided necessary function and output for billing schemes based on hours of usage. If you are interested in how this was done please let me know and I'd be happy to discuss details. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts you can reach me on Twitter via @WebSphereClouds.

A recent announcement signaled the coming release of WebSphere CloudBurst 1.1. This new release of the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance delivers enhancements to all phases of the lifecycle of virtualized WebSphere Application Server environments. Let's take a closer look at a few of these updates.

First and foremost, WebSphere CloudBurst 1.1 delivers support for the PowerVM platform. You can now deploy patterns to create virtualized WebSphere Application Server environments running in a PowerVM environment on pSeries servers. Among other things, this is enabled by a new version of the WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition. This new version of the virtual image contains an AIX operating system and has been specifically bundled to allow it to be activated on the PowerVM hypervisor. From a user standpoint, building, deploying, and maintaining WebSphere Application Server environments is done from the same console with the same look and feel regardless of the target platform. Check out this demo to see WebSphere CloudBurst and PowerVM in action.

In addition to support for PowerVM environments, WebSphere CloudBurst 1.1 will also provide a trial edition of a DB2 virtual image. You can import this image into your WebSphere CloudBurst catalog and then use it to build and deploy DB2 environments. This allows you to, from the same centralized interface, deploy and integrate both your application and data environments in your private cloud. Check out this demo for more information on the new DB2 trial virtual image for WebSphere CloudBurst.

One other cool feature I want to point out delivers an enhancement to the use of script packages in WebSphere CloudBurst. In this new version of the appliance, you have more control around when script packages you include in a pattern are executed. Previously, these were executed toward the end of pattern deployment once all the necessary WebSphere Application Server components had been started. While that is still the default behavior, you can also elect to have the script package invoked when the virtual system is deleted, or you can choose the invocation to be user-initiated meaning that you decide when and how many times your script runs. To check out a pretty handy use case for this feature, watch the demo here.

These aren't the only new features and enhancements delivered in WebSphere CloudBurst 1.1. Stay tuned for more demonstrations and more words about these new features and when and why you would want to use them. In the meantime, if you have any questions be sure to stop by our forums.

One of the most powerful features of WebSphere CloudBurst is the ability to take one of the WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition virtual images that are shipped with the appliance and extend it to a produce a custom virtual image. This allows users to begin creating customized environments from the bottom up, starting with the operating system. To put it in better context, let's take a look at a couple of scenarios where this feature comes in quite handy.

First off, a very common need for our customers is the ability to continually monitor their application environments. For instance, you may install Tivoli monitoring agents on all of your machines hosting WebSphere Application Server processes and configure those agents to report back to a management server. This is a great case for image extension in WebSphere CloudBurst.

In this scenario, you would start by extending an existing WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition image. WebSphere CloudBurst creates a running virtual machine based off of the selected image, and you log into that virtual machine and install the Tivoli monitoring agents. Once the installation is done, you capture the virtual image back into the WebSphere CloudBurst catalog and use the new image to build a custom pattern. The last step is to include a script package on this custom pattern that, upon deployment, will configure the installed monitoring agents to report back to your desired management server.

Another use case is likely to be of interest to you if you are using WebSphere Virtual Enterprise (or something similar), and you could benefit from the same ease of provisioning for those environments that WebSphere CloudBurst brings to WebSphere Application Server environments. You can use the same customization combination above (image extension and custom scripts) to enable WebSphere CloudBurst to essentially dispense WebSphere Virtual Enterprise cells.

Again, this scenario starts off by extending a WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition virtual image. Once the virtual machine for the extension is created by WebSphere CloudBurst, you log in and install the WebSphere Virtual Enterprise product. After the installation is done, you capture the image and store it in the catalog. Next, you build a custom pattern based off of this image and include script packages that, upon deployment, augment the various parts in the pattern from WebSphere Application Server profiles to WebSphere Virtual Enterprise profiles. (You may wonder why you wouldn't just create the WebSphere Virtual Enterprise profiles during the image extension process. This is because during image extension, you cannot make changes to the virtual disk that contains the WebSphere Application Server profiles. Any changes made to the profiles will be wiped out during the capture process.)

There are countless more scenarios for creating custom virtual images in WebSphere CloudBurst. To name a few, you may want to install JDBC drivers that are common to almost all of your application environments, install required anti-virus software, or just make operating system configuration changes. All of these things can be accomplished through the image extension and capture process. Look for an article coming out soon that will discuss and explain, in much greater detail than I provided here, the process of installing and configuring Tivoli monitoring agents in environments dispensed by WebSphere CloudBurst. In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, drop us a line here or check out our forum.

One of the things I haven't written about much here is how the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance integrates with other IBM software solutions. One of those interesting integration scenarios, and one I think is particularly useful for developers, involves Rational Build Forge.

Very simply put, Rational Build Forge is an adaptive execution framework that allows users to define completely automated workflows for just about any purpose. These workflows are represented as projects that contain a discrete number of steps. When looking at Rational Build Forge through the software assembly prism, the offering allows users to fully automate and govern the process of building, assembling, and delivering software into an application environment.

Now, on to the integration of WebSphere CloudBurst and Rational Build Forge. Users can build custom patterns in WebSphere CloudBurst that include a special script package (which I'll eventually provide a link to from here). This script package provides the glue between the deployment process in WebSphere CloudBurst and Rational Build Forge. When deploying a WebSphere CloudBurst pattern that contains this script package, users provide the name of a Rational Build Forge project as well as information about the Rational Build Forge server on which the project is defined.

Once the necessary information is supplied, the deployment process gets underway. Toward the end of the deployment, like all other scripts included in patterns, the special Rational Build Forge script is invoked. This results in the project specified during deployment being executed on the virtual machine created by WebSphere CloudBurst.

Because the Rational Build Forge project executes on a virtual machine setup by WebSphere CloudBurst, the individual steps of the project can very easily access the WebSphere Application Server environment. Thus, the Rational Build Forge project could very easily contain steps to build, package, and deploy an application into the WebSphere Application Server cell. The result is a fully automated process that includes everything from standing up the application environment to delivering applications into that environment.

I put together a short demonstration of this integration, and you can take a look at it here. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or comments. Your feedback is much appreciated!